Oil and Water
by OwlWoman
Summary: Caroline and Tyler: Starts from Ep. 2x10 The Sacrifice.  I want to see the potential in this relationship, and so here is my effort... reader feedback is my muse, so please share your thoughts...
1. Chapter 1: Pacey, Spongebob, & Analysis

A/N: Hello lovely readers,

I have always had a thing for side-kicks (e.g. Pacey from Dawson's Creek; Hyde from the 70's show; Michael from Roswell; Logan from Veronica Mars; the short(er) and stout(er) M&M from... M&Ms... you get the idea...)

So here's my ode to side-kicks and side romances in all great (or less) sagas everywhere... the clawed Romeo and fanged Juliet (yes, yes, very corny ;)

I would love to give you a synopsis of this story - if I only knew it myself. As Richard Russo said in one of his interviews, _I am slow to sense structure - _but I make up for it with the frequency of updates (I typically like to write a chapter (even a short one) every day (except weekends) once the urgency of a story takes over. I have written fanfictions on other sites and have come to find out - to my great shame - that I am a writer who cannot write in a vacuum. I am greatly motivated by reader feedback. Who isn't? but still... I would love to write just for the sake of writing, but it's the ready feedback that really takes it to the next level ;) I know, I know... seriously vain. So, reviews would be greatly appreciated - about pluses or minuses in plot, dialogues, characterization, writing style (such as my tendency for run-on sentences and the overuse of ... and parentheses. But worry not, I am in the process of procuring a beta), etc etc...

And now without further ado,

* * *

OIL and WATER

Chapter 1:

He had always been an unflinching example of the rich and privileged douche-bag who she was sure was hiding the same-ol' neglected childhood-with-daddy-issues shit. Which made him, theoretically at least, not all that different from her own bubbly-blonde-pep-squad-pageant-queen-committee-freak neurotic with mommy issues.

Which all made it quite satirical that she was a vampire and he was a werewolf now. Talk about ruining their future plans of going on to live out the rest of their lives in shallow happiness that masked a deep-seated discontent while basking in the relative comforts of the lifestyle such as they were born to. Instead, now they were destined to live out the eternity that faced them in hunger, rage, and malice… ultimately dismantling into what she was sure would be an unrelenting monotony… _totally uncool_…

But being a vampire had some perks too, no doubt. It has made her… strong, certainly. Powerful? to a degree. Confident? Infinitely. But it wasn't the confidence that everyone perceived as such. In her case, it was the confidence to be as neurotic and insecure as she wanted. Which, surprisingly, was _not_ as counterintuitive as it sounded.

The downside? The fact that she spiraled into these quasi-philosophical ponderings that had no clear objective and no end in sight. She hated Dr. Phil. She hated pop-psych. Hell, she had even hated the pretentious metaphysical musings of those fake high-schoolers in Dawson's Creek – with the exception of Pacey, of course. Pacey could tell her that the only true reality that existed was inhabited by a certain animated sea sponge that gained its fame from wearing square pants and she would have happily believed him without blinking. But she digressed. The point was that she couldn't abide the thought that what lay ahead of her was this barren flatland of her mind that seemed to be crumbling under the threat of an uncertain immortality by attacking itself. And its choice punishment - personal analysis. Oh, Lord, if she had any aim for the rest of her unnatural life, it would be to find a way to go back in time and kill that bitch Katherine before she had set out on her path to prove to everyone that she topped evil bitches everywhere… But the sad thing was, she was sure that even Katherine had her own story. Who the hell didn't, nowadays. She would love a villain who was evil just simply for the sake of being evil. Not because there was some poor sob story that was the backdrop of it all to somehow allow for excuses and entitlements…

Okay, she really needed to stop. This cynicism was totally unbecoming and it was driving her up the wall!

She heard a growl just then and glanced up from where she was perched in the dank outcropping of the cellar where he was shackled to the wall.

It was starting then… tonight would be the first night of the rest of his life… and all he had for company was a newly turned vampire mentally disintegrating from a premature and duly unwelcome existential crisis…

She would pay to have the raging hormones of teenagers again… to have every other issue that was any issue at all to be no more of an issue than how her ass looked in a particular pair of jeans or how much of her roots were showing or how adorable Matt was when he had that puppy-dog look in his eyes…

She had always been a sucker… and given what she was now, the irony of it all wasn't lost on her…


	2. Chapter 2: The Seven Chakras

Water and Oil

Chapter 2:

When his mother was going through her yoga craze, he had heard her recite a bunch of ancient eastern religion mumbo-jumbo. He didn't remember most of it, of course, but there was something that did stick with him. _The Chakras_. There were seven of them – the base, the sacrum, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the third eye, and the crown. He had never known that his memory was so strong, but there it was…

He could now feel each of those Chakras turning, isolating the pain to each region in turn while his body twisted and writhed, the wolf trying to establish its dominion over each cell. And the kicker was that it was just starting… he couldn't even imagine how bad he'll be howling in several hours' time when the wolf would try to take over completely.

When the pain allowed him a moment's reprieve, he wondered what sort of mutation this was that seemed to serve no real purpose at all. Unless, the whole purpose of this transformation was to test his perseverance in tolerating pain. Or maybe… maybe, the assumption was that anyone having the gall to kill someone also had the proverbial "thick skin" that allowed them to suffer through the torture of this night? But he hadn't killed anyone on purpose… not that there was any werewolf jury to make his case to… it didn't matter though… Someone had died at his hands. As much of a dick as he was, even he knew that what he was about to go through tonight wouldn't be enough justice for taking a life.

He wondered if anyone had died during their first time. He wondered what would happen if he survived tonight. Strangely enough, the possibility of death did not faze him all that much. He wondered, not for the first time, why Forbes was helping him. He wondered many things, not that it did him any good.

The pain struck him suddenly without warning. It was the chakra in the sacrum now, having moved up from the base. It contorted his body in half and was so intense that it cut off his power of speech for a few seconds. When it passed, he emitted the growl that had been stuck in his throat, although he couldn't help but feel cheated that it came out as a very pale imitation of the pain that had preceded it.

She was near him in a flash; there was some advantage to being able to run at the speed of light.

"Tyler? Are you okay?" He heard her crouch down behind him gently and when he didn't respond, she took his head onto her lap and smoothed her palm over his sweaty forehead.

"Are you okay?" She asked again.

He tried to speak, but his voice came out so hoarse that he had to stop and start again.

"You know, Forbes. This pain is like thunder and lightning. By the time I make whatever embarrassing noise that I am making, the pain has already come and gone."

He could see that she didn't know how to react to what he said, so he helped her out by trying to crack a smile. It was not his best effort, especially because he had partially lost feeling around his lips.

"Don't worry Forbes. It's not too bad yet. You'll know when it gets really bad. That's when I'll be trying to tear your non-beating heart out."

And this time she did smile while she absently smoothed his hair back. He couldn't tell her how much that touch meant to him. It would be the only thing carrying him through the rest of that horrendous night when the pain got so bad that he wondered how his nerve cells didn't explode from the intensity. He had hoped for a certain level of numbness, maybe an out-of-body experience, even some hallucinations, anything to distract him from what was happening to him, but nothing like that happened. He felt it all… He felt it when he turned on her that first time, forcing her to leave the room and lock it behind, he felt it when he tried to claw his way out of his shackles and out of the cellar, he felt it when he couldn't run away and the animal in him stalked back and forth in that claustrophobic space, taking its rage out on the human body that it saw as its sole restraint.

When it was all over and the beast receded, leaving behind only his battered body and withered soul, the only thing he remembered aside from the pain was a hazy image of an angel who had smoothed his hair back. He didn't remember that it was her until she came back to him as the dawn broke through. And when she hugged him to her and once again gave him her nurturing touch while telling him that he had made it through and that he was okay, he finally did tell her the truth.

"I am not okay, Caroline."


	3. Chapter 3: Bait and Switch

Chapter 3:

How would this play out? How _should_ this play out?

She was obsessing, she knew it, but she had been pretty good at not even thinking about it for the entire weekend. And that was saying something.

She will just pretend as if nothing untoward had happened.

Nothing Untoward had Happened.

Whew…

_Nothing untoward had happened_…

Boys were finicky. As soon as a girl so much as sniffed out an inkling of vulnerability in them, they inevitably chose one of three options: a) run away from you, b) try to reestablish their complete invincibility – usually through choice measures that proved beyond a doubt that they were not just vulnerable, but also dunderheads, or c) and this was the rare one and the mark of a man rather than a boy - those who faced the situation head-on, keeping the awkwardness factor to a minimum between both parties.

Given that she had gone through the boy's options, she figured that it was only fair to go through the girl's options. She can: a) obsess endlessly and break her own personal record of _obsessing endlessly_, b) ignore the situation completely, thereby making him confused and making her obsess even more, or c) same as the C above.

She took a deep breath. She would prefer option A, but what the hell, she was a vampire. Anything was possible.

She caught sight of him out of the corner of her eye just then and took another deep breath to put the much deliberated over option C into action.

He was walking in her direction. She paused by her locker for a few more seconds before closing it just as he reached her side.

"Hello Matt."


	4. Chapter 4: The Beast and the Invalid

Chapter 4

Matt looked surprised that she had talked to him and stood there floundering for a moment.

She wanted to jump in and say something to ease the awkwardness, but she stopped herself. No, they could do this without she being the one to always prod things forward or smooth over the rough patches or define the nature of their relationship.

"Hey…" he said, sliding his fingers into his pockets, rocking back on his heels.

Well, alright… so that was progress.

"How are you?"

He hesitated a beat before finally releasing a breath. "I'm alright…"

What was that? Three lines altogether?

"How was your weekend?"

"It was… so, so…" he paused and looked down.

A moment later he must have remembered his manners, because he looked up to return the pleasantry, "How was yours?"

Ah, how was hers? How _was_ hers? Well, let's see. She had volunteered, during several particularly masochistic moments in her life, to be present for the transformation of their mutual play-pal since toddler years into a lycanthrope, who by the way had a precise fondness for sinking their venomous canines into bloodsuckers such as herself. In the midst of it all, she had found out that Tyler - with his rage issues and his classic dick moves of making out with both Matt's mother and his sister and any number of the other things that he has done over the years that has elevated him to the status of a stellar human being - was a surprisingly grateful werewolf.

By the same token of boyhood that she had attributed to Matt, there should have been some definite awkwardness between her and Tyler this morning. She hadn't seen him since dropping him off at his house on Saturday morning, after the night from hell. She had called his house on Saturday and Sunday to check in on him and his mother had told her each time that he was asleep. It may have been that he had been avoiding her, but she hadn't thought so. Particularly because his mother had appeared both surprised and concerned when she had told Caroline that Tyler could not seem to stay awake for more than an hour at a time before falling asleep for another six or seven hours straight. Mrs. Lockwood had also hinted her suspicion that this was the side-effect of some potent form of cannabis or maybe something stronger. _Wolfsbane__, Bourbon, Werewolf DNA_… Caroline's mind had recited, while she pretended ignorance and gave the excuse that she and Tyler were working on a school-project together for asking Tyler to call her back.

But, no calls all weekend. Finally, this morning she had gone to check on him at the house. She had decided to skip the main entrance to avoid telling more lies to Mrs. Lockwood and had just climbed up a tree and jumped to his second floor bedroom's window-ledge.

The windows were open and she had crept as quietly as she could into his bedroom. As long as she had known him, there had never been a reason for her to come up here. And so she took a quick look around now to orient herself. It was a rather large one, not unexpectedly. She found his bed in the center against the left side wall. She walked over and stood there for a moment, watching him sleep. She was tempted to let him sleep and come back later to check on him again, but then reminded herself that he had essentially been sleeping for more than 48 hours.

"Tyler…" she called softly. He didn't move.

"Tyler…" she called again, gently shaking him.

And this time he did open his eyes. He appeared disoriented for a moment as he looked at her before sitting up in surprise.

"Caroline? What are you doing here?"

G'Morning to you too, Rip Van Winkle." She smiled.

"God, I can't seem to stay awake, Caroline. I am convinced that mom is going to call the doctor today if I can't figure out a way to take Red Bull intravenously and not fall asleep."

"Is this normal? I mean, do you think this is normal after the first time you change? Or, are you having something unusual happening to you?"

"I have no idea." He said as he shook his head and he threw off the covers to get out of bed. His legs gave out just as he stood up and she caught him.

"Careful!"

"Lord! How am I going to make it to school in this state?"

"Have you been this weak all weekend?"

"Weaker." He replied before he steadied his legs and started walking, carefully at first, but then with a normal gait. "This is a vast improvement. That first day, I fell off the bed when I tried to get out and had to crawl on the floor for fifteen minutes before I could make myself stand up. And by then, my body was so exhausted from the effort that I crumbled right where I stood and fell asleep on the floor."

"Why didn't you call me?" She asked, feeling an unaccountable anger swell up at the thought that he had decided to keep her out of the loop after what they had been through.

"What? And ask you to come to my house so that you can carry me back to bed? Come on Forbes."

"I have seen you worse!" She answered in agitation.

"You have seen me as a beast, not as an invalid!"

She must have looked taken aback by what he said, because now he walked back to her, still cautiously, as if he didn't really trust his legs to accommodate any sudden movements.

"Caroline… don't you think I have asked enough from you? The last thing you need is to babysit a werewolf pup because he can't seem to get his act together."

He said it softly and she could feel the true sentiments behind the words, but she still felt angry.

"If I remember correctly, I volunteered my help. You didn't beg me. And don't insult me with this macho act. This is not you trying to do one up over your buddies and prove that you are the alpha-male! This is you turning into a werewolf and not having any other person to go to to figure out how it works. What is it with you men? It's like a woman is never strong enough to help because your "man" crises are so huge that our puny little brains and frail bodies couldn't possibly be of any real use or assistance."

She turned away after she gave the whole agitated speech knowing that she was in complete overreaction mode. It was just that he had needed her before. It felt good to be needed. It was _great_ to be needed, in fact. It was the only thing that kept her from thinking too deeply about what her life meant from now on. From giving into those irritating self-analytical loops that she was so prone to nowadays that made her want to poke her own eyes out.

She felt his hand on her shoulder then and turned around. Without warning, he hugged her. She stood there in shock for a moment, not knowing how to react. He didn't seem to be fazed by her lack of reaction and kept his hold around her until she hugged him back. And then he finally pulled back to ask with a smile, "Carry me back to bed, please?"

She felt her lips widen in a smile and hit him on the shoulder.

"Ouch. Careful Forbes!" He said, rubbing his shoulder.

"Oh my God! I am sorry. Did I hurt you really?" She tried to pull his hand away from his shoulder to rub it herself.

"Sucker!" He laughed out loud before stopping to add, "Shit, that's right. There's a pun there now. You _are_ a sucker!"

This time she punched his arm in real. And while he rubbed his palm over his hurt arm in earnest, she was at the window again, climbing out as she called out, "That's a sucker for you! I will grab your assignments and be back this evening. You better be walking by then Lockwood!"


	5. Chapter 5: Fight me Back

Chapter 5:

When she returned that evening, climbing in through the window again, he was nowhere to be found. She lowered herself to the floor and called his name softly, scanning the length of the room.

"Tyler…"

She felt him at her back at the last second and in a move that convinced her beyond doubt that her vampire reflexes were much stronger than her human ones, she turned around and pinned him to the wall. She loosened her hold immediately once her mind clicked into place from the temporary limbic response that had overtaken for an insane second, but clearly the hurting werewolf had recovered spectacularly, because as soon as her hold slackened, he pounced on her with enough force to knock her down.

"What the!" she exclaimed before she threw him off of her.

He came back, surprising her yet again, this time twisting her arms behind her from the back and pushing her against the wall.

"Tyler!" she called his name in agitation, no longer trying to fight him, but also not knowing what had gotten into him.

"Fight me back, Forbes." He whispered harshly in her ear.

"What?" She tried to shake off his hold, but not with much force.

"Fight me back!" He repeated, pressing harder on her twisted hands.

She pulled her hands out of his hold in a sudden motion that caught him off guard and turned around swiftly to twist him around so that she had him in a choke-hold from the back.

"Would that do?" she asked, tightening the crook of her elbow against his wind-pipe for emphasis.

She felt his taut muscles loosen for a moment and relaxed her hold as well, only to have him turn around and twist her arms behind her back – this time facing him - and press in on them, which in turn pushed her body to his.

She could feel her face starting to turn, the skin beneath her eyes tightening and her fangs elongating; her breath was coming in bursts and she tried to focus on just his dilating pupils as she fought to regain control.

He pressed on her hands with force again and she growled instinctively.

"There's my favorite vamp…" he said now, smiling, before he let go.

She took a few more deep breaths before she trusted herself to speak.

"Are you freakin' playing with me?" Her voice came out low and she was sure that it let him know how angry she was.

"Oh come on, it's only fair." He turned his back on her and walked towards the bed.

She rushed at him and knocked him onto the bed before twisting him around under her to pin his arms to the bed.

"What's fair? Was that some shitty joke for your personal amusement? 'Let's see how I can get a rise out of the vampire chick, just to get back at her for seeing me all vulnerable'?"

He was quiet for a moment. "It wasn't a joke."

"Then?" She asked when he didn't elaborate any further.

He didn't respond immediately, but he didn't move either. She realized that she was pressing down hard on him and started to ease up, but he stopped her.

"No, don't. The pressure feels good. I feel like I am going to jump out of my skin. I want… something… I don't know... Fighting you feels good. You are the only one strong enough that I know of who can fight me back now. Well, if only you would fight back…" he added with a smile at the end.

It took her a moment to absorb what he was saying and what he wasn't saying...

"You are not as strong as you were on Friday, Tyler. I can really hurt you now."

"I'll take that risk." He said easily.

"No you can't. What's wrong with you?" She got off of him and lay down next to him.

"I don't know… I don't know what's wrong with me…" he whispered now, not looking at her.

She didn't know what he meant, but she also knew that she didn't want to know anymore at this moment. So, she did what she always did when something made her nervous. She deflected.

"Did you eat dinner?" She asked, sitting up suddenly.

He shook his head and she got off the bed, pulling on his arm. "I am starving. Let's go see what your mom has stocked in the refrigerator."

He let himself be pulled up, but paused to ask, "If you are hungry, don't you need blood?"

"Why, are you offering me yours?" She asked with a deadpan expression.

When he looked taken aback and started to say, "uh…", she laughed.

"God, I am kidding! No, this is the human kind of hunger… when you really don't want food for sustenance, but just to be a glutton."

"Ah… I love that kind." He laughed and agreed.


	6. Chapter 6: You Don't Smell Like a Man

Chapter 6:

"So, has the world changed much while I died and came back to life?" there was a self-mocking tone to his statement and she watched him out of the corner of her eye as she raided the refrigerator and found a foil covered tray of lasagna that only had a small piece missing from the corner.

She pulled it out and put it on the counter of the kitchen island and wiggled her eyebrows at him as is she had discovered the lost treasure of Genghis Khan.

His eyes widened, suddenly distracted by a hunger that roared to life inside him, and he was at her side in the next moment, reaching into the tray with his fingers.

"Uh-uh!" she smacked his hand away. "You are not eating like a savage animal."

He raised his eyebrows and shot her a look.

"Yea, yea… there's a pun there now. Lord, there are so many freakin' puns that it's hard to keep track. But Tyler-Lockwood-who-is-past-his-servitude-to-the-moon-for-the-month, I know your mother raised you better!" She took the tray off the counter and turned away from him.

"You know, Forbes, I only have to put on the gentleman act to impress hoity-toity girls. It's just you and me now. Mano-el-mano. So, what say you?"

He wouldn't let her walk away and held her around the waist in a death grip while he tried to pull her extended hands with the tray back towards him.

"Ha ha. Nice try. You know I am stronger now. This is not going to work." She warned him.

His hand slackened suddenly and she laughed. "You gave up that quickly?" she asked as she turned her head towards him.

That's when she felt him nuzzle her hair.

"You don't smell like a man." He said absently in a low tone that did not seem quite like a consciously made statement.

She felt a sick feeling in her heart as tiny butterflies suddenly erupted into flight deep in her belly.

He had been through too much in the past few days. He hadn't seen another human being in three days in fact, except his mother. He was having a wolf version of cabin fever. That was it. She had to snap him out of it without any room for awkwardness.

"Nooo… Right now, I smell like cold day-old lasagna. Which you are not getting any of no matter how you try to trick me. So Lockwood, unless you want to be in another chokehold, you are going to sheath those wolf claws and get some utensils." She kept her smile in place as she walked out of his hold and towards the oven.

She could see his reflection on the shiny black surface of the microwave. He stood confused for a few moments and she started talking immediately about all the inane crap that had gone on in the now vastly uninteresting landscape that was high-school. It snapped him out and he looked at her strangely for a moment before he opened the drawer next to him to grab forks and knives.

She set the oven to pre-heat and kept her face focused on the microwave the whole time she kept up her absurd chatter.

Rather than looking annoyed, it seemed to soothe him… he pulled up two of the counter stools and set the placemats and utensils and grabbed a pitcher of water and glasses. And for the first time in all the years that she had known him, she could tell that he was listening to what she was saying… maybe not the content – hell, even she didn't know what the hell she was talking about right then; half of it she was making up as she was going along – but rather the routine of it… this was the Caroline that he knew… and if Caroline was the same before and after his night from hell, then maybe the world hadn't tilted on its axis… and maybe life as he knew it hadn't disappeared entirely…


	7. Chapter 7: Aches and Pains

Chapter 7:

He didn't know what insanity had overtaken him that he had smelled her hair so blatantly. He even thought that he had said something out loud about it. He was grateful that she had diffused the situation as she had done. He didn't want to see _her_ in that way. Equating women with sex came easily to him. Disturbingly easily. Otherwise, he wouldn't have made the douche-bag move to make out with his best friend's mother. A piercing pain shot through his head as soon as he thought of that night. He clutched the sides of his forehead as the pain made him see stars.

Caroline stopped talking and rushed over to his side.

"Tyler. Tyler! What's wrong?" Her touch against his arms felt strange, as if there was a tiny vacuum of space just around where she fingers connected with his that felt light. On instinct, he brought her fingers up to the side of his forehead and the pain diffused slowly.

_What the hell?_

He closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to see the confusion on her face or explain what he was doing. He didn't know what he was doing. Did vampires have healing powers? He didn't know. She held still without moving, letting him press her fingers deeply into his head. When the pain disappeared entirely, he opened his eyes.

She raised an eyebrow in question while her eyes still showed concern.

_Had she always been like this?_ He wondered now. He had never met anyone as compassionate. Why had he never noticed before?

"Sorry. I just had this sudden splitting pain inside my head. It's gone now." He muttered as he walked away from the counter and towards the oven. "It's probably because I am hungry enough to eat a whole cow. When is this going to be ready, Forbes?"

She didn't answer him right away and he surreptitiously watched her reflection on the surface of the microwave. She was watching him, concern still evident in her eyes and he felt a sudden frustration build inside him.

"I don't want your pity, Forbes. If you are going to give me that look every time I act strange, I can take it from here. I will see you in school tomorrow."

He saw her eyebrow shoot up in agitation and felt relieved immediately.

"This is not pity, you jackass. This is my new and improved version of is-he-trying-to-pull-one-over-me-in-new-werewolf-fashion look."

He laughed as he grabbed the oven door handle and she did her vampire run-at-the-speed-of-light-trick and came to slam the door.

"You're going to let the heat escape." She crossed her hands across her waist as her whole body blocked him from making another _heat-escape attempt_.

"I have to find uncle Mason." he said suddenly.

She was taken aback by the abrupt switch in topic and looked towards the overhead cupboards, opening them to take out plates.

"Um… Yes, yes, we do." she said as she took the plates to the counter.

"Are there others like you? Who made you? How do you know about me?" he asked, all the questions that had been floating through his head for the past three days spilling out all at once.

He saw her movements slow and she paused to take a deep breath before turning around to face him.

"It's a long story…" she said finally.

"I have time." He replied, walking towards her.

The timer beeper just then and she turned towards the oven in relief and walked to get their dinner.

"My car broke down in the woods around your family's cellar one evening and I roamed around without cell reception until it was nightfall."

She turned around to face him. "I was bitten and changed that night." She said with uncharacteristic brevity.

He walked to her, watching her fluttering eyes and remarked curiously, "I thought vampires couldn't walk in the sun."

She gave a nervous laugh and looked down to twist one of her rings as she said, "Ah… just a myth."

"What happened to the vampire who turned you?" he was almost upon her.

"It left town. This was just for its brief amusement." She picked up the dishtowel hanging over the over handle and fidgeted with it.

"You told me that you killed someone before." He said once he stopped near her.

She nodded and turned away from him, wiping a nonexistent speck on the counter.

"Who?" he asked.

She kept her eyes lowered and it was after a few moments that she answered, "I don't know. She may have been someone's mother, or sister, or wife, or daughter… I don't know."

Her voice broke at the end and he suddenly felt contrite for grilling her like this.

He leaned over her shoulder to look at the sizzling lasagna.

"Let's eat. I am ravenous."

She looked up, caught off-guard again by the sudden change in topic.

"If you make me wait anymore Forbes, I swear, I will eat this whole tray with my claws like the savage animal that I apparently am." He put his hands around so that she could see all ten of his wiggling fingers for effect.

She smiled then, and for the second time that day, he felt unexpectedly relieved.


	8. Chapter 8: H to the power of 4

Chapter 8:

Return to high-school was a novel experience, which he found to be somewhat of an oxymoron. Everything was the same, and yet everything was different. Caroline was the only thing steady in his life; by no fault of her own, she had become his anchor. Especially as life as he knew it came to be ruled by what he termed - during a particularly nerdy moment - _H to the power of 4._

_Hunger_ was ever-present. From the moment he woke, it followed him with the tenacity of a hound biting at the heels until abruptly letting go once the nightmares of REM sleep took over.

_Hatred_ for everything about himself and his life before the last full moon was next on the list. It had managed to permeate every particle of his consciousness to a degree that resisting the urge to harm himself in some fashion had become a full-time job. It was a sordid punishment for having inhuman strength. The one thing that prevented him from acting on any self-mutilating impulses was the fact that any time he thought of his innumerable sins from the seventeen years that he had taken to accumulate them, the piercing pain started in his head almost immediately. The worse the shit that he had done, the harsher the pain. No amount of the extra-strength variety of acetaminophen or aspirin made a dent in the pain. Only Caroline's touch helped. He tried not to make it obvious, but she must wonder at how often he made her feel his forehead at the pretense of checking whether he was coming down with a fever so that he could leave school. He could only pull that off for a few seconds, but it was enough to dull the pain so that it no longer blinded his vision.

_Heuristic_ was the way in which his new life worked. Everything was trial and error. How he could manage his hunger; how he could manage his anger; and how he could manage… _other _powerful drives that he had… There were no books, no guidelines, no nothing that he had looked through that gave him any reliable information aside from uncle Mason's journal of that night. But that journal didn't chronicle anything except Hell, which he was mightily blessed to have been through himself and cared not to re-experience even through light reading. There was a veritable black hole of information on the internet; some of it was true, but most of it, there was no way for him to verify. One thing that he had read that stuck with him was that werewolves were prone to long periods of melancholy and depression from everything they did during their time as wolves. From his limited experience thus far, it was not just from the times when they ran as wolves, but from every other time as long as they lived… He suffered no melancholic depression, merely an unremitting self-loathing – which he would _not_ buy as a sign of depression – and of course, the head-splitting migraines.

And last, but not least… and this was the most alarming H of all, especially as it managed to co-exist in bizarre harmony with all the other H's, just minding its own business. He was horny almost every moment of his waking hours… and a generous number of the nocturnal hours too… he hadn't had this level of… _physical readiness_… since the early days of puberty. The only time the need for sex receded was when he would have his migraines. And thus it had become necessary to invoke memories of all the shit that he had done to force a raging migraine on himself to lessen the threat of a raging erection while in public.

The sheer amount of mental power required to balance the four H's made him think that his brain might spontaneously combust before long. However, weeks passed and it remained intact, not even one nerve cell having the courtesy to rupture and put him out of his misery.

Instead, what _had_ happened was that he had become a highly irate shit-head who had to control the urge to bark out obscenities at anything that annoyed him… which was everything…

Except Caroline…


	9. Chapter 9: Bitchy Little Twit

Chapter 9:

She knew he hid most of what he was going through from her. He couldn't abide to be around anyone for more than ten minutes. Girls were the worst for him, she had noticed. In fact, he quite actively avoided the cheerleaders, which was an incredible feat given his now even more improved athletic prowess and tireless energy. And his aloofness and constantly preoccupied look only served to make girls flock to him like moths to flame despite – or maybe _because_ of – his reputation as a dickhead.

He only had three classes with her, which made it all the more odd to everyone else that he got a hall pass at least once every period to come find her. Usually, it was under the pretense that he was falling sick. Somehow she had become his thermometer. He often held her palm over his forehead and insisted that she needed to hold it there for at least twenty seconds to properly assess his elevated temperature because in his words, "wolves tend to run hot anyways…" She indulged him in this bizarre routine only because she suspected that something else was going on that he just didn't want to tell her.

Even though Stefan, Elena, Damon, and Bonnie knew about him, they obviously tried not to let him know. Matt, on the other hand, did not know and he was the one who was having the most difficult time. It didn't help that aside from playing ball, Tyler didn't spend too much time with him. And Tyler's preference for her above everyone else was starting to become a bit obvious. She didn't have the heart to tell Tyler that people were starting to think that they were an item. He so clearly needed a friend and treated her as nothing but. Matt was starting to get annoyed with all the talk, particularly as Tyler seemed to not even know that there was anything wrong with the amount of attention he needed from her or gave to her.

This morning had been particularly bad because Tyler had seemed genuinely restless and had found her in a rush and pulled her away from Matt with a brief apology. He had taken her to the back of the school where there had been no one else and had dropped to his knees, startling her. For a brief moment, she had seen his eyes turn and had dropped down next to him, frightened.

He hadn't answered her worried questions, but had grabbed and crushed her hands against either side of his head. She had held still without breathing, terrified without reason that he would turn without a full-moon in full daylight. But he hadn't. Within a few minutes, the scrunched up lines of pain on his forehead had eased and the tension in his shoulders had visibly relaxed.

"Why do you do this?" she had finally asked.

He had opened his eyes and had been about to speak, but had suddenly looked up behind her. When she turned around, she had seen Matt standing by the door, watching them.

"It's not what you think. I swear to God, man. I wish I could explain, but I can't." He had stood up and had started walking backwards, shaking his head and he said in a hoarse voice, "Honest to God. It's not what you think."

He had turned around and walked away then, leaving her with a mildly irate and surprised Matt.

"And to think that he had thought you were an insecure, neurotic, bitchy little twit not that long ago." He had muttered under his breath, not knowing of course that she had freakin' bat ears now.

When she got home that evening, he was waiting on the porch for her.

She gave him a brief look before unlocking the front door and walking into her house. Her mother wouldn't be home for several hours yet, which of course he knew well.

He followed her in, surprised at her cool reception.

"What's wrong? Was Matt angry? Did you guys fight?" he asked, standing against the counter while she opened the refrigerator.

She kept him waiting while she drank water before saying with as much nonchalance as she could manage, "No, he was just surprised that the same guy who called me an "insecure, neurotic, bitchy little twit" is now in constant need of my company.

"What?" he asked with no evident recollection of his words as she grabbed a container of leftovers and walked to the oven.

"Wait, I called you what?" he asked again.

"Insecure Neurotic Bitchy Little Twit." She repeated as she opened the microwave.

He was quiet for a moment and she was overtaken by the need to look back to see what he was doing, but resisted the impulse.

By the time she closed the microwave the turned it on, he was behind her.

"Oh come on Caroline. It's not like we were close back then. And I thought it was a publicly acknowledged truth that I was a tool. Since when do you take those things to heart?"

"If I am _insecure_ and _neurotic_, not to mention _bitchy_, you see how I _would_ find such lovely adjectives hurtful?" she knew she was being somewhat unreasonable, but what the hell? He didn't have to be so… _mean_.

She still didn't turn around, but then thought that she should have, because he moved in closer to her and placed his hands on either side of her and leaned in even though no part of his body touched hers. "I was an asshole. I am sorry." He said plainly and honestly before standing there patiently, waiting for her response.

She felt as if it would have been less intimate if he had touched her. This level of proximity was generating a sort of humming in the tiny space that separated their bodies that she found distracting.

"Yes, alright." She said quickly, hoping he would move away.

There was an infinitesimal delay before he did. And it was enough to convince her that she shouldn't spend so much time alone with him.


	10. Chapter 10: A Healing Touch

Chapter 10:

"What happened to you this morning?" she asked as she brought a plate piled with food to him. His appetite had become insatiable nowadays, she had noticed. He didn't show it to anyone else, but whenever they were alone, he was eating not just his food, but most of hers too.

"Nothing." He said absently without touching the food as he lay back on the couch, running his hands over his face.

"Tyler!"

He lowered his hands and looked at her.

"Nothing… really."

He stood up and walked to the window, his food abandoned. He gave her his back and stood there, looking out at nothing.

She waited him out, knowing that he was more likely to take her question seriously if she wasn't her usual chatty self.

And finally he did, although what he asked startled her enough that she dropped the fork that she had been holding in her hand.

"Is a werewolf bite fatal to a vampire?" his tone was low and steady as he asked.

He didn't turn around at the clang of the fork, although she was sure that he took it as an affirmation.

She walked away from him into the kitchen under the pretense of acquiring a new fork, although even that time wasn't enough to think up a good excuse or answer for his question.

Once she came back with a new fork and resumed her stance, leaning against the side table, she discovered that he was using the same tactic as her. He was waiting her out.

"Yes." She finally said, quietly.

He slammed a fist against the ledge of the window so hard that she jumped from the memory of her human reflexes.

"What the hell?" she was near him in a flash, looking at his now bleeding knuckles.

He did not give the blood or the wound any consideration as he asked again, his voice lower than before. "When did you know?"

She hadn't realized that he had been angry all this time.

She started to walk away from him, but he pulled her back in agitation.

"When the hell did you know?" he was practically yelling now as he forced her against the wall.

"Calm down. Tyler, _calm down_." She held a hand against his chest so that he wouldn't ram her against the wall like he had done that first time when he had accused her of being a werewolf and had broken one of her mother's paintings.

"I want an honest answer, Caroline. Don't fuck around. _When_ did you know?" he asked again, backing away a millimeter to appease her.

She found that she couldn't look him in the eye for this answer. She didn't want it to come across as some martyr mission of hers where she had foolishly put her life – _non-life_ – at risk for someone who wasn't even all that close to her. That just had teenage drama and angst written all over it. As if she didn't realize the value of life – even an existence such as hers.

"I knew before, alright. But it's not like what you think. I…" She said quickly and looked up briefly to see his response. She was alarmed when she saw his eyes turn, the pupils dilating into large dark orbs and the iris turning a dense green and expanding so quickly that the white disappeared completely. His face contorted in pain as he suddenly clutched his head. On impulse, she brought up her hands to stroke his forehead. His eyes opened in surprise and his hands fell away and she moved her palms over to hold them on either side of his head. His eyes changed back slowly from the beast to Tyler and all the while his gaze was trained on hers.

She had figured it out over the past two weeks, of course. She just hadn't wanted to acknowledge it. For whatever reason, her touch eased his pain; not metaphorically, but literally… Seeing in now full-fledged – watching the easing of his forehead, the deep groves around his eyes, and the tension in his jaw – brought forth a genuine burst of happiness as she had not experienced in a long while. There was something tremendously healing in giving. She smiled in that way she had only done once or twice in her life; in pure joy.

She hadn't seen it coming – even with her vampire and human reflexes combined, she hadn't seen it coming. He kissed her suddenly, the surprise of it making her lose her balance, trapped as she was between the window and him. It only made him hold her around the waist to steady her and bring her back to him to kiss her again.

She had done her fair share of kissing before, humans and even a vampire, but it was the first time that she thought that one could be burned alive by a single kiss… that just a few moments of mouth to mouth could torch your body and soul in equal measure. Vampire or no vampire, her heart didn't care at the moment as it tried to prove all the myths of the bloodsuckers wrong and tried to beat its way out of her chest. Her skin caught on fire... It was too much… he was too much… this was too much… everything between them was too much…

She pushed him away at last when she thought she would melt like a wax-doll left in the Sahara heat.

He was breathing hard as he stood there staring at her.

"I have to go." He said finally, running his hand over the back of his neck and turning around to the sofa.

"Yes, you should." She heard her own soft reply and watched him grab his bag and leave, unable to move from where he had left her. She touched her lips and thought for sure that they were singed.


	11. Chapter 11: Sneaking In

Chapter 11:

He wanted to beat himself up about it, he really did. What he had done had innumerable repercussions on so many levels. He didn't want to fuck up or complicate things with the only person he could count on now. And he really shouldn't kiss his best friend's girlfriend… but then again, he had screwed up things with Matt in so many ways that it was a miracle that Matt hadn't gotten a restraining order against him. Above all, he couldn't trust himself right now. Nothing he felt could be trusted, and yet he had kissed her…

He felt remorseful, yet he knew the emotion was not sincere because there was no piercing pain inside his head. Instead, his head felt lighter than it had all week. But his body… that was another matter. He shouldn't have done anything to further incite it. But, now it was too late to bemoan what he had done in the heat of the moment. Moving on and forgetting was really the only option.

That option was successful for three whole days. For three whole days, he avoided her completely. She didn't seem all that eager to seek him out either; he was thankful to her for making it easier for him to stay away from her. His headaches came at irregular intervals still, but somehow the pain was duller, more manageable.

All in all, it should have continued to be successful in the days ahead as well… except… he found himself climbing up the side of her house to the second floor deck a quarter past one in the morning on the fourth day. He sat on the railing and leaned over the side to knock on her window. Knowing the sheriff, her mother, the house had to be alarmed to the hilt. He knocked a second time and finally saw the lamp turn on inside the room. She looked more groggy than alarmed as she approached the window, although her eyes widened when she saw him.

She raised the window pane and looked out below and then around before giving him a hand so that he could climb over the edge of the house and onto her window ledge and into her room.

"Tyler, what are you doing here?" she whispered in agitation before leaning over to scan the surroundings once more before closing the window.

"It's past one in the morning!" she whispered again, but then her eyes widened in alarm as she came up to him and touched his forehead.

"Are you ill? In pain?"

His breathing accelerated automatically at her nearness and he could hear his heart start to pound like a jackhammer.

"Don't touch me, Caroline." It came out more harshly that he intended as he removed her hand and walked back to the window. "And put some clothes on." He added.

When he turned around, he saw her look down at her night-gown in confusion. It was one of those long frilly things with thin straps that was somehow chaste enough that it should have made her look like Madonna on the Rocks. Instead, the light of the lamp or the light of the moon or maybe a suddenly developed x-ray vision – whatever was to blame, he swore he could see every detail of her silhouette through the gown. It was distracting.

She walked around the bed and got a wrapper and put it on before standing by her bed, looking at him questioningly. She was taking his request to not touch him to heart.

"Why are you here?" she asked again.

He didn't know what to say. He didn't know why he had come.

And after getting her out of bed and rebuffing her touch and insulting her choice of night-dress, he didn't particularly feel that it would be _well received_ if he expressed any confusion or ambivalence.

And thus he asked something else entirely, which had also been weighing heavily on his mind.

"Someone named Jules called home today. She was looking for uncle Mason."

Caroline tilted her head at this news.

"She said that uncle Mason never made it back to Florida. Where could he be?"

"Has he done that before? Taken off just like that?" she asked, walking around the bed to the other end to start making the bed. He wanted to ask her why she bothered as she would be climbing back into it anyways.

That didn't really help his focus and thus he turned to face the window ledge while she continued.

"I don't know. He's always been a wanderer, but had settled in Florida for some time now. She wants to meet up with me."

"Who?" Caroline asked him almost absently and he turned around in surprise at her inattention.

"This woman, Jules!" He answered.

"Oh." that was all she said as she returned to tucking the sheets.

It was driving him insane. Even though he couldn't move as quickly as she did, he was still fast as he came near her and pulled her away from the sheets.

"Stop! You are going to go back to sleep. Why are you making your bed?"

She appeared surprised to see her wrists in his and looked up at him before shaking off his hold.

"You told me to not touch you. The same rule applies to you too."

She turned her back on him and he felt an unaccountable anger well up. Why couldn't she understand?

He turned her around to face him.

"It's another week and a half until the next full moon. I can't have you anywhere near me then. Do you understand?"

Her face softened immediately and he wished he hadn't come when she said, "Tyler…" in that sweet way of hers.

"No… _No_… have some self-preservation instinct, Caroline. It must be stronger now that you are a vampire." He said, pulling her closer to him without realizing it.

"However we were during our human life, it's just much more heightened when we are vampires. At least that's how I feel. So, it just means that I am _extra_ neurotic, _extra_ bitchy, _extra_ insecure, extra _twitty_…" she grinned.

The urge to kiss her again was so bad that he let go of her hand and turned away.

"You can't help me anymore. I will have to do it myself."

"You can't do it yourself, Tyler. No one should be alone during something like that."

Selfishly enough, there was such relief in hearing her say that, but he knew he had to figure something else out. He wouldn't voluntarily put her in danger.

He sat on the edge of her bed and she sat down next to him.

"Do Vampires have healing powers?" he asked suddenly.

"I don't know. I have never heard of something like that." She answered.

"I have been researching it online. I can't find anything on it. And it's not like there are other vampires floating around that I could ask."

He looked over at her when she didn't reply. She was fidgeting with that ring of hers again. It was enormous.

"What is that? It looks like some sort of Gothic heirloom." He took her hand in his to look.

"Nothing… just a ring…"

He didn't realize that he was holding onto her hand until several minutes passed and she pulled on it gently to get him to release his hold.

He let go and looked up in surprise.

There was a flush climbing up her neck and her skin glistened from the heat in the room in the soft light of the lamp.

He had known the girl since they were toddlers and had never found himself even accidentally noticing anything about her skin or how it looked like when she was flushed. Hell, he couldn't remember noticing something so corny about any girls before. They had to be in his face to get his attention and given that there had never been a lack of in-your-face girls before, he had never had the chance to notice subtleties. Now all he noticed were subtleties, like how she bit her lower lip when she was nervous, or how she gestured a lot with her hands when she talked, or… how she looked at his best friend.

He got up abruptly and was at her window before he looked back at her. She remained by the bed, although standing now.

He thought of what to say as he held her gaze.

There was nothing to say, really. And thus he climbed out her window as abruptly as he had come in, feeling equal measures of relief and restlessness.

He looked back at her window when he was down, but the light in her room had been turned off already. Wolves had good vision, though. He noticed her standing by the side of the window, trying to be inconspicuous as she watched him leave.

He found himself smiling as he started jogging back home.


	12. Chapter 12: Like Oil and Water

Chapter 12:

"You know, there is nothing in this book that is of any help whatsoever." She said in all seriousness and Stefan tossed her a juice box – she refused to call it a 'blood bag'; it really just sounded yuck – before turning around to face her.

"What book would that be?" he asked, grabbing one for himself.

"New Moon." She answered, waiting for recognition to strike.

Instead, he tilted his head in the way that he did and gave her a blank stare.

"You know? Team Jacob? Twilight!"

He shook his head as he took a sip.

"Come on Stefan! Have you been living under a rock? Bestseller of the past – I don't know – like five years. Edward and Bella! Kinda like you and Elena! Come on! Even Damon knows more pop culture than you!"

"Damon is a hard-core consumer of pop culture. All he does is stay at home drinking bourbon and blood and watch cable."

They both laughed at that unnatural image of Damon as Stefan walked over to the sofa to take the book from her.

As he paused to read excerpts from random pages, she enlightened him.

"Meyers is just as wrong about werewolves as she is about vampires. We are waaay less pasty than the Cullens. And we are definitely warmer to the touch." She smiled widely when he looked confused.

"I am definitely all about Jacob, but seriously, werewolves do not get to keep their clothes after a transformation. It's just not practical or feasible." She continued and then looked at Stefan to see him raise an eyebrow in question.

"I mean, not that I have seen anything. Just an FYI, you know."

He went back to the book and then asked, "What is this? Werewolves that shift at any time? Ha! We sure would be far fewer in numbers if that was the case."

"Do you know if we can heal them? Werewolves, I mean. Do we have the power to take their pain away?" she hoped the question didn't stand out too much in their general conversation, but of course it did, because he paused reading and laughed out loud. When she looked down and fidgeted with her ring, he stopped laughing.

"Wait, you are serious? Where did you hear that?"

"Nowhere." She shook her head.

"Caroline, Vampires and Werewolves… It's like Oil and Water. We don't mix. In fact, we usually assure mutual destruction, not healing."

When she continued to look down, Stefan touched her shoulder to get her attention.

"Tell me. What happened?"

"Nothing…" she trailed off, still lost in thought.

"Caroline."

She looked up and knew that it was better if Stefan knew. She couldn't handle all this by herself. She didn't know how to help Tyler. And if she could trust anyone in the world, it was Stefan.

"Nothing really…. It's just that Tyler has been having these headaches. Like intense ones where he almost doubles over from the pain. They happen a lot. I think he's in pain all the time…" she trailed off.

"Tell me the rest."

"If I touch him, it seems to… ease his pain." She said in a low voice, looking down again.

"What? Are you serious? He is not messing with you?" Stefan asked sitting forward on the couch.

"You should see him Stefan. He's in bad shape."

"I _have_ seen him. He doesn't ever seem to stay in the same place for more than five seconds nowadays."

"I know. He's so restless. And he won't tell me exactly what he is going through either. He is so alone, Stefan. And it's not like he is great at asking for or accepting help."

She looked at Stefan when he didn't answer her right away.

He was looking at her strangely.

"What?" she asked, drawing back.

"Are you…" he started.

"No!" she answered right away and then looked away when she knew she had been too quick in her denial. _Had she learned nothing from Shakespeare?_

"Caroline…" Stefan's tone was soft now as he called her attention again. "You know I am the last person who would give you advice about…. _inter-species_… relationships. But, as your friend and as someone who knows a little bit about the centuries of bloodshed between the two, I have to warn you. It would be incredibly hard if you fell in love with him."

"Of all the crazy ideas, Stefan!" she said agitatedly as she stood up and walked to the window.

"He is all alone. He needs a friend. A _friend_, Stefan. Since when does that equal to falling in love? Sometimes, friendship is more important than love!"

She was twisting her ring again, a habit that she really needed to stop. It just reminded her of the number of lies that she had told Tyler already and what would happen when they all came to light. And she knew that they would. It was just a matter of time. Tyler didn't trust easily at all. And he never showed vulnerability. He showed her both. It killed her to know how much he would hate her once he found out the truth.

"And you're one of the best friends anyone could ever ask for." He said softly and she looked up in surprise. He always knew what to say. Not like Damon, who only said what shouldn't be said.

She smiled widely and walked back to the couch to sit next to him and grabbed her half-finished juice box.

"You too." she told him honestly.


	13. Chapter 13: I wish I could Regret

Chapter 13:

He had gotten a taste of climbing up to the second floor of her house and into her room and liked the fact that he didn't have to deal with her mother. Ever since his father's death, her mother's relationship with his mother had become somewhat strained.

He sat on the railing of the second floor deck and leaned over to knock on her window. However, the windowpane was already up and he could see that she had the TV on. She was lying on the bed in her pajamas… and was quoting along verbatim with whatever show was on screen. Clearly, she was watching something that she had already seen a number of times.

He listened…

It was a conversation between a girl and a guy on TV… And Caroline's expressive voice along with it.

_"This morning. Your arm brushed up against me in bed… and I felt it." _

_"How did it feel?"_

There was some hesitation on the girl's part and the guy repeated, "_How did it feel, Jo?_

He saw Caroline's face scrunch up in similar hesitation with the character before she said along with the girl, "_It made me feel alive."_

There was a pause… and he watched her absorbed attention and guessed that something momentous was about to happen.

The guy on TV spoke then and proved that his hypothesis wasn't entirely wrong.

_"Okay. Joey, I'm going to kiss you now." _

Caroline watched the scene without saying a word.

"_You can't_" she said in reply, along with the girl.

He heard the guy's voice next and saw that Caroline was holding in her breath as she listened.

_"Look, Jo, you can't say something like that and expect me not to kiss you… so that's exactly what I'm going to do. I'm going to kiss you in about ten seconds, and if you don't want me to kiss you… well, if you don't want me to, I guess then you're just going to have to stop me…." _

There was a long pause this time and he leaned over farther to watch what was going on.

He leaned a bit too far and lost his footing and his seat and almost fell off. The noise was enough to alert her and she was near him in the blink of an eye, helping him as he gained his balance and climbed into her room.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, looking at the clock in her room.

It was almost midnight.

It hadn't struck her yet that she was still holding onto him, but he could concentrate on little else as he felt the touch of her fingers on his forearms.

"…Ten." They both heard suddenly and it startled them enough that they looked at the TV…. Just in time to see the guy kiss the girl.

Since when did things like this get awkward? It was the most g-rated kiss ever and the couple was interrupted in 0.02 seconds.

But, the damage was already done. The effect was instantaneous.

He looked at her and saw that she was biting on her lower lip as a light pink hue spread up her neck. She refused to look at him.

And just like that, all the good safe platonic thoughts flew out of his head like cotton in the wind.

He pulled her closer to him and her eyes closed even as she whispered, "You can't…"

"I know…" he agreed just before he kissed her neck.

Her neck arched as she gave a gasp of pleasure and her hands moved up from his forearms to his arms to hold on.

As it was, he was keeping a lid on his lust just barely. And yet, somehow, he managed to hold onto his control and not attack her.

Besides, her skin was so soft… he had never really noticed how soft girls were before…

Her hands trailed up his arms reflexively until she was holding him around the neck, tilting her neck to give him maximum access, her breath hitching and releasing in short bursts in turn.

He caught her around the waist and backed her slowly against the wall. He kissed along her jawline and just before his lips touched hers, she put her hand up between them.

Her breathing was labored as she turned around to face the wall, away from him.

"Caroline…" he whispered.

"Please leave, Tyler. Please…"

He stood there watching her for several moments.

He could move in and touch her again as he so very badly wanted to. He knew there was a part of her that wanted it as badly as he did. But unlike him, she had a greater part of her that was loyal… and good. And even though she and Matt were not officially back together yet, he knew that's where they were headed. That was the inevitable conclusion and he was the unlikely detour, if this was even that.

He has always been careless with relationships. Even close ones. Case in point, the number one cause of his migraines - seriously heinous shit like what he had done with Matt's mother… and to a certain extent, his sister.

Carelessness and lack of impulse control – they had both driven his behavior with the opposite sex rather than a great need for sex. He had always gotten more than enough sex to ever crave it. This was not about sex though. He didn't even want to have sex with her… well, not yet at least. All he wanted now was to touch…to stroke… to kiss…

The werewolf thing had totally addled his brain.

"I wish I could regret this…" he told her before he turned around to climb out of the window.

* * *

A/N: For those of you who don't know, Caroline is watching a scene from the show _Dawson's Creek_ above (Pacey and Joey's scene from the episode _Stolen Kisses_ from Season 3). For those interested, here's the clip: y o u t u b e .com/watch?v=0ha_QUYs_5U&playnext=1&list=PLF1A9614F00CD4C59 Start at about 2:00


	14. Chapter 14: The First Reprieve

Chapter 14:

She didn't know how long she stood there after he climbed out of her window.

"_But the point is not how I feel. The point is how _you_ feel!" _she opened her eyes when she heard Pacey's voice from the screen.

She remembered the very first time that she had seen this episode. She had walked around in a sort of adolescent-high all day, completely enamored with Pacey and replaying the angst and the romance of the scene in her head repeatedly.

No one had ever measured up to Pacey, and Joey by association, in her eyes. For her Dawson's Creek had had the perfect ending when Pacey and Joey had sailed off into the sunset at the end of the third season. Of the show's six seasons, she only owned the third one; for her, the entire show was season 3, the epic love affair of Pacey and Joey.

How silly that all sounded now. She didn't believe in "true love" anymore. Those days of weaving fantasies were gone… somehow, drinking human blood to remain in this permanent space between life and death did not jive with discovering _true love_. Besides, she watched what Stefan and Elena went through and knew that as much as it was a pain the neck, fighting evils like Katherine, Elijah, and the impending doom called Klaus were the only things that kept them distracted from what lay ahead for them. There were no easy decisions… none at all. And even if it could be that simple, Damon wouldn't make it so.

She, on the other hand, had given up hopes of her happily ever after. There _was_ no happily ever after. This existence was only periods of grief alleviated by brief reprieves. No wonder her kind decided that emotions were a liability and shut them off. She had been tempted to do the same, but she couldn't… She wouldn't be Caroline without all the highs and lows that her emotions gave her…

If Tyler was a reprieve, it was a reprieve of gargantuan proportions. If she was fully human and hadn't had the past year that she had had, she wouldn't have been able to turn him away tonight…

But she knew she was in trouble. The memory of one kiss could somehow be pushed away... made to disappear… it was not true yet, but she wanted to think that it would be. The day after he had kissed her that first time, Matt had kissed her too. And she had given it her all, trying to recapture the sweetness that had been there before. The sweetness was still there… and a softness that made her heart ache. But it made her heart ache because she knew that even giving it her all didn't do the trick. She was likely ruined for a long time to come….however long it would take to forget how it had felt like when a werewolf had kissed her.

Still, the memory of one kiss could be forgotten with time, she was hopeful. But not when he started doing things like climbing into her bedroom in the middle of the night and stealing kisses.

Her eyes closed again as the memory of his lips against her neck assaulted her. She trailed her fingers along where his mouth had been and felt as if she had been branded.

Of all the guys in the world, she never would have guessed that he would be the one who would make her feel this way. Given her track record with the opposite sex, she should have known it. But she was going to teach herself through any means necessary that you always pick the good one, the sweet one… you _never_ pick the asshole, no matter how many butterflies you get from his kisses… no matter how many times during the day your mind replays every time he has touched you… no matter that you are the only one who has ever seen him vulnerable…

Her lips parted even as her eyes squeezed tight in an effort to exorcise the memory of his words… "I wish I could regret this…"

She wanted to tell him that _she_ did… she regretted every time she had accepted his touch. She regretted how helpless she was to resist… and she regretted what she knew was yet to come….


	15. Chapter 15: Code of Chivalry & Violence

Chapter 15:

Bonnie had just leaned over to tell her something in homeroom that morning when Elena suddenly rushed into the room to their side.

"You guys need to come out here."

"What happened?" Bonnie asked but Elena was looking right at her.

Her heart sank suddenly as she asked, "Is it Tyler?"

Bonnie looked back at Elena to ask, "What's wrong with Tyler?"

"He…" Elena started to answer, but she didn't wait for Elena's reply as she rushed out of the room.

She hated that she had to run at regular speed in the high school hallways, but just as she turned the corner, she bumped into Stefan who put out his arms to steady her.

"Where is he?" she asked without any preamble, knowing that if Elena knew, then Stefan must know as well.

"In the principal's office." He told her.

Before she could rush off in that direction, he held her back.

"Caroline, he gave a kid a bloody nose and would have likely done worse if Matt hadn't pulled him off."

"What? Why?" she asked as he made her walk to the principal's office rather than run.

He didn't answer right away and she knew that he knew.

"Stefan, what happened?"

"It was nothing." He said just as they reached the front entrance and she saw the ambulance and the stretcher on which a senior that she knew was being carried out. His face was a bloody mess.

"What the hell?" You call that nothing? Stefan, what happened?"

"Wolf boy has developed a tendre for you, Forbes?" they heard from behind them and turned around to face Damon.

"What are you doing here?" Stefan asked just as she cut in, "What do you know, Damon?"

"Aah… my sensitive and protective brother over here didn't tell you? Wolf boy rearranged someone's face because the kid simply asked him whether he was "tapping that ass". Now, from my limited interest in the googly eyes that you both have been throwing at each other, I can only surmise that the _ass_ in question is yours."

"Damon…" Stefan started in that tone that he always used with Damon when he was being his wonderfully asinine self.

"He did _what_?" she asked Damon, feeling a coldness spread through her.

"Ah, Ma Cherie, I think the wolf was protecting your honor. Maybe they have a lycanthropic code of chivalry that involves making a bloody mess if someone insults their woman." He leered at that thought as she gritted her teeth for patience and asked, "Is he in there still?" gesturing to the principal's office.

"Nah. The cub has a very protective mother, as you know. Mayor Lockwood was here before anyone could say 'boo.' I can assure you though, our boy was not happy about mommy dearest's intervention. But she did make him leave with her. Too bad. I was hoping for some fun. Now I just have to go back to the daily humdrum of this dead town."

"Why are you really here, Damon? It can't be because of Tyler." She heard Stefan ask as if from far away. She could have told Stefan that Damon wouldn't go anywhere unless it had something to do with Elena, but then again, that wasn't anything Stefan didn't know already. But she didn't have much interest in their riveting love triangle at just this moment. She had to find Tyler.

"Caroline!" she heard Matt's voice from behind her and turned around, stamping down her impatience to be off.

"Where are you going?" he asked once he was near her.

"Oh, nowhere. I was just…"

"I take it you heard about Tyler." He asked when she petered off.

"Not really. Just that he got into some fight." She gestured with her hands, hoping that what she felt inside didn't show on her face.

"Yea, it was the strangest thing. He hit that kid for such a silly reason. This is the same Tyler who asked me when you and I started dating whether I was _tapping that ass_? Since when did he become a hypocrite?"

"He's your best friend, Matt. It's one thing for him to ask you that and another entirely for some random guy to ask him that about me."

She could tell that Matt was taken aback by her tone or that she differentiated the meaning behind what was said.

"I am sorry, Matt. Let's catch up later. I need to call my mom."

As far as excuses went, that was the most implausible one, but what the hell. She didn't really care right then.


	16. Chapter 16: The Last Reprieve

Chapter 16:

She climbed up to his room, but had to hang back for a few moments when she saw that his mother was in the room with him.

She heard Tyler's voice first.

"Don't ask me what happened or why. I am not going to have that conversation with you right now."

There was a brief pause before she heard his mother's answer. "I stopped asking questions the day you made out with that trash and provoked her son into a fight. What a fine boy to be friends with! I don't think this little macho-action at school is more shocking than that."

She peered around the branch that was in her face and saw Tyler clutch his head suddenly. There was a pattern to his migraines, she was sure. But she was not fully able to figure out what that pattern was. Stress? That seemed too vague. Besides, Tyler was not the type to be easily stressed out.

"Mom, can you leave me alone please?" she heard him ask in a quiet voice.

"Can I go back to work with the assurance that I don't have an unhinged adolescent with a complete and utter lack of self-control calling me away from my duties as the Mayor of this town?"

She saw him start at that, then clench his jaw, before he nodded.

Just as his mother turned around to leave though, he suddenly made his own request. "As long as I have the assurance that you will not speak to me for two whole days. That would really help cut down these nagging migraines of mine."

Okay… so Tyler had more mommy problems that she did. And that was saying something, with her mother who attempted to rule the home the same way that she ran her job. Things hadn't exactly improved in that regard since she turned into a vampire. Although, having the number one vampire hunter in town – Sheriff Forbes, aka, mother – living in the same house as her gave new meaning to _keep your enemies closer._

Not that Tyler made it easy. But then again, the late Mr. Lockwood wasn't exactly doting father extraordinaire with his little fascination for taking the belt to correct his errant son's disobedience. She didn't know what his mother's role had been in all that. All she had known was that Mr. and Mrs. Lockwood had had a strained marriage.

She shifted her attention back to the room and noticed that his mother did not respond to his request as she walked out of his room, shutting the door behind her.

Just as soon as the door shut, she saw him turn around and rush towards the door to lock it. In the next second, he dropped to the floor clutching his head and bit down hard on his hand to muffle what could only be his screams.

His hand was bleeding profusely within seconds. This was not the bruising and traces of blood that he had obtained from punching her window ledge that time when she had confirmed that werewolf bite was indeed fatal to vampires. There was a copious amount of blood flowing and dripping onto the wooden floor next to him.

In alarm, she felt the now familiar tightening under her eyes as her fangs elongated with blood lust.

_Hell._

She closed her eyes and tried to take deep breaths and think of green meadows and ponds. She was alone. Utterly alone. There were no humans, no animals, no water creatures, not even a critter. No living beings that were mobile whatsoever. She imagined that she dived into the pond. She remained underwater for a long time until breathing became necessary and she needed to surface. She finally opened her eyes when she felt calmer and looked into the room again. Tyler was no longer where he had been.

It was the perfect opportunity and she jumped into his room, lifting up the partially opened window.

There was a small pool of blood on the floor and she quickly dragged his sheet off the bed to absorb it. The sheet was large, but the sight of the absorbed red stain was distracting and disturbing to her at the same time and she swiftly located the electric fireplace and turned it on. The fire, blessedly, came alive quickly enough. Just as she grabbed the sheet and threw it into the fire, she heard the bathroom door open and Tyler walk out with a towel wrapped around his injured hand.

"What the hell?" he asked when he saw her.

She glanced at him briefly before feeding more of the sheet into the fire.

"Forbes, I am really not in the mood. I want to be alone." He told her as he walked to his bed.

Alright, so maybe her rejection last night had struck a nerve.

"Are you alright?" she asked, ignoring his request.

"Yes, I need to sleep. So, if you don't mind." He said tersely as he climbed onto the bed.

"Can I help?" she asked, an image of his muffled screams stuck in her head.

"I appreciate the offer, but I really don't want to sleep with you." He said coldly, throwing two of the pillows on his bed onto the floor.

"You know that's not what I meant." She told him as she fed the rest of the sheet into the fire before walking to the bed.

"I am not in the mood to know what you meant, Forbes. Please leave." He told her as he closed his eyes.

Ah, touché. He was using her words against her.

"Tyler…" she started in a soft voice, but in the next split second, his arm shot out and she found herself underneath him.

Surprisingly, her face didn't turn into the beast that was inside her, but her breathing accelerated. She didn't have the desire or the mental strength to resist him right then.

"I gave you a chance to leave. You should have taken it." He told her, bringing both of her arms up over her head and holding her wrists in one hand.

She closed her eyes when she knew they would tell him exactly what he wanted to see.

She felt the back of his free hand stroke down her cheek and turned her face to the side as she felt a fluttering in her chest.

He was so potent… and so much trouble. What the hell was she doing?

"You shouldn't have come here, Caroline. I am having a really _really_ bad day." he told her as his lips replaced his hand and grazed along her jaw to her ear.

She was glad that her eyes were closed.

He wandering mouth reached her lips and lingered over them without touching.

She wouldn't open her eyes. She wouldn't do anything to encourage him. In fact, she would keep them shut. She knew she was a hypocrite, but it didn't matter in that moment as she bit down on her lower lip in some strange intimation of preventing him access.

Of course, it had the opposite effect, as she was sure that she had known it would… because in the next instant, his lips were over hers.

She felt as if it had been eons that she had been waiting for this. The sensation of his lips moving over hers was so intense that she stayed still without participating… only selfishly absorbing what he was giving her. His lips gradually trailed down her neck… and her wrists were still in his hold, preventing her from discovering what her hands would have done had they been free. She was glad for that as well.

That blissful reprieve with him in that bed that afternoon was cut short soon enough.

A noise startled the both, and it took her moment to register that it was her phone.

Incidentally, immediately afterwards, his phone started ringing as well.

He drew up and looked at her and she bit her lips before she said, "I have to get that."

He eased off of her and she was at her bag the next instant to grab her phone.

She picked up to hear Damon's voice bite out, "Blondie, wherever the hell you are, I hope you are not near wolf-boy. And you need to get back here ASAP."

She snuck a look in Tyler's direction and saw that he was looking at the vibrating phone in his hand strangely.

"I have to go now Tyler." She said as she grabbed her bag and made it to the window.

She looked back and saw him nod. Just as she jumped over the window, she heard him answer his phone.

"Hello Jules."


	17. Chapter 17: The Dark Passenger

Chapter 17:

There would be a full moon tonight.

He was running through the woods. There were branches and twigs and shrubs that he sidestepped without conscious thought. His eyes were turning into the now familiar monstrous green orbs intermittently as his rage spiked. He had been running close to fifteen minutes at breakneck speed; his body was burning hot and his black t-shirt was matted to his chest. Yet he felt not the slightest twinge of fatigue… not the slightest easing of his fury. If possible, his rage was mounting. There was a large rock in his path that he saw well in advance that he could have avoided. Instead, he found himself picking up speed as he sprinted straight into it. In the split second before a crash would have been certain, his body crouched on all fours and jumped ten feet high, sailing over the rock. There was not a pause as even that feat that he had only imagined that he saw uncle Mason do showed itself to be true.

Uncle Mason….

_Do you know where Uncle Mason is?_

_He's dead Tyler. He was murdered_. The woman who called herself Jules had told him earlier that afternoon at the grill.

_No. _He had uttered the single syllable in shock.

_You want to know who murdered him?_

_Just stop! _He had told her, instinctively knowing whose name would be invoked.

_That little blonde vampire did._

_No, _He had repeated that mantra like an imbecile. _Caroline would never do that. _

He didn't think it possible, but his speed increased as a burst of energy took over his insides.

_She and her little vampire friends are behind it, Tyler. _Of course there were more. Why had he let her evade his questions?

_Caroline is the only vampire in town. _ He had staunchly and stupidly stuck to his guns.

_Is that what she told you? She lied. _

She lied. She lied. She lied. She lied.

His mouth opened to emit an enraged scream as he whacked a heavy branch out of his way rather than run around it.

_Why would she lie? _He had asked then, more of himself than of Jules.

But she had thought to reply anyways. _The Blonde is their little watchdog who is on werewolf duty. They didn't know that there was any other werewolf other than you and Mason. They killed Mason. And now it's only you left. Barbie delivered you on a silver platter to them. Brand new werewolf ready for the plucking. _

He had clenched his jaw and had tried to not show it as he ran his hands through his hair.

It had been enough to make her ask, _She did quite the number on you, didn't she?_

The rage had suddenly prickled every particle of his skin, burrowing in deep, trying to take over from the inside out. But he had forced himself to imagine Caroline's face in his mind's eye and had focused his gaze on Jules as he asked,_ And why should I believe you?_

She had held his gaze for a disconcerting moment and he had seen her eyes turn with much more control than his ever did or even uncle Mason's.

_I am like you. In our world, that makes you family. If that doesn't convince you, then know this. You have no one left, Tyler. No One. _

Each of her words had dropped around his neck like a noose. He hadn't been able to wait to get out of there, the place that held so many of his childhood memories, now threatening to suffocate him with its pretense and lies.

_Don't worry. We'll get them. _She had told him as he got up to leave.

Yes, Yes he will. He will get every fucking last one of them. Starting with the blonde bitch who had led him on a merry chase with her false concern and her sham compassion. Since when had his brain fried out that he could think it plausible that creatures who drank human blood had it in them to have genuine affection for their prey.

The full moon burned bright even in the falling light of the day and it was calling out to him. The beast in him wanted freedom. And he was in the mood to oblige. He wouldn't tie himself up tonight. He hoped the bloodsuckers were ready. As Dexter would say, it was time to let his _dark passenger_ loose.


	18. Chapter 18: Day of Truths

**Chapter 18: Day of Truths**

"Ah, Blondie. Fancy seeing you here. I thought you would have shown a perfect lack of sense and rushed over to Lockwood to become wolf-chow, seeing as how it's a full moon and all." Damon remarked in characteristic bad humor as he opened the door for her.

"Nice to see you too Damon. Where is Stefan?" she had found that engaging Damon by responding to his little verbal gems only made him that much more insufferable.

"He is upstairs and expecting you." He said casually before drinking out of the glass of bourbon that was permanently affixed to his hand and walking into the enormous space with cathedral ceilings that the Salvatore brothers called their living room.

Stefan was on the phone when she got upstairs.

He hung up and turned around and said as soon as he saw her, "We got trouble, Caroline."

"What?"

"Damon had a run-in with Jules. He has managed to piss her off."

"What a surprise." She said, rolling her eyes.

"Well, it couldn't be at a worse time, seeing as how it's full moon and all."

"Jules has called Tyler a couple of times, but I don't know if he has met with her yet."

"You cannot go near him, do you hear me Caroline?" he told her emphatically.

She walked away from him. "He's all alone, Stefan." She finally said, not looking at him

"He has Jules."

"We don't know that for sure." She countered.

"Caroline, if he knows, he is going to want to kill you."

She didn't reply as she looked out the window.

"Given how strong he will be tonight and considering how new he is at this, you can only guess that he will have a go at you and think of the repercussions later."

When she still didn't offer a response, he walked up behind her.

"Caroline, if we aggravate this any further, Damon is going to go find him and kill him rather than merely waiting for provocation. He thinks all werewolves should die."

She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath before turning around.

"He's my friend, Stefan. I can't leave him alone."

He sighed.

"But I won't put any of you at risk. You have to believe me. I will figure this out."

"It's not us that we are concerned about. Damon and I can handle ourselves. You, on the other hand, you are a bit of a sucker for the lone wolf, Caroline. That's going to make you the most vulnerable."

She would go to Tyler and tell him everything herself. She knew time was not on her side, which made it all the more imperative that she needed to do it as quickly as possible. She had called Tyler a few times this afternoon, but it had kept going to voicemail.

"I will take care of myself, Stefan. I _will_." She smiled as she added, "You taught me well."

He didn't smile in return as he said, "Flattery will not get you out of this."

She walked closer to him and said seriously, "If it were Elena, you know you would do everything to protect her."

He drew back and said in mock surprise, "I thought you said that Tyler was your _friend_."

"Yes" she said without hesitation. Whatever brief madness had happened between her and Tyler, they were still friends. "This is what friends do for each other. You don't abandon them in their time of need."

He tilted his head. "Even at risk to yourself?"

She thought for a moment whether her answer would have been different earlier, in a different life, when she was fully human. She found that she didn't know. And now she would never know. But she knew what her answer was now.

She didn't say yes or no, but instead said, "I would do the same for you, Stefan."

He sighed once again and nodded, "Alright. Go see him. Explain to him. But know this. I will come looking for you if you don't call me to tell me what's going on in an hour."

She nodded again and walked downstairs with him.

Damon was in the hallway when they walked through and said, "Wait, you are going to let her leave? What the hell?"

"She will be back." Stefan said.

Damon shook his head. "You trust these girls too much. Have you learned nothing from the permanent sacrificial lamb that your puny little girlfriend insists on being?"

"If I survived being compelled and used as a human toy by you, the psychopathic vampire that you are Damon, then I can handle a werewolf." She interjected before Damon riled up Stefan.

"Ah, I was going easy on you, blondie. If I had wanted, you would be dead by now." He answered her as she opened the door to leave.

She couldn't resist turning around and saying, "You didn't do me any favors there."

She saw Damon open and close his mouth before she turned around to walk away.

But her sensitive hearing did pick up what he said once he closed the door and turned to Stefan. "I never knew blondie had suicidal fantasies. If you don't go rescue that chick, I will be forced to step in, Stefan. And you know how that will turn out. It won't be pretty.


	19. Chapter 19: Friend and Foe

**Chapter 19: Friend and Foe**

"He's not here, Caroline. In fact, I haven't seen him since he left the house this morning." Mrs. Lockwood told her a short while later.

"Do you have any idea where he could have gone?" she asked and saw Mrs. Lockwood draw back at her urgency.

"I mean, remember that project that he and I have been working on. Well, it's due on Monday and he had agreed to meet with me this afternoon." She quickly added.

"Oh… hmm… I heard him talking on the phone with someone called Jules. It seemed he was going to lunch with this person, although I couldn't be certain."

She felt her heart sink. She was too late already.

"Alright. Thank you Mrs. Lockwood." She said, but her face must have shown her disappointment because Tyler's mother touched her shoulder just as she turned away.

"Caroline…"

She turned around.

She waited when the woman appeared to hesitate.

"Is he okay?"

Her eyes widened briefly before she looked down.

_No, Mrs. Lockwood. The males in your husband's family carry the werewolf gene. It makes them aggressive, unpredictable, and downright lethal during a full moon. Your brother-in-law was a werewolf and now your son too has triggered the curse by accidentally killing a girl. And the only person in the world who he trusts with all this has betrayed him. If he has discovered the betrayal, during tonight's full-moon, he will have the bloodlust and the venom of vengeance running through him. So, the answer to your question is a resounding No, Mrs. Lockwood. Your son is not okay._

Even if she would have been able to tell Mrs. Lockwood all that she just recited in her mind, the trouble with parents was that they rarely understood their children, even when they so eagerly wanted to. They tried to think of how they may have felt when they were the same age, but rather than a generation gap, the reality was that memories faded. And no matter how hard you tried to relate to what it is like, in the end, you still had to be a parent… with all its limitations, lack of understanding, and fear... They didn't call it unconditional love for no reason. It was the only reason she cut her mother some slack.

"Caroline?" she heard again and raised her eyes to Mrs. Lockwood.

"He is having a tough time with something, Mrs. Lockwood." She told her, not wanting to lie entirely and somehow wanting to make amends for Tyler's comments to her yesterday. It couldn't be easy to deal with her husband's death, manage a son like Tyler, and take on the duties of being a mayor all on her own.

"But he will be okay." She added with a smile.

Mrs. Lockwood seemed unsure, but then gave her a hesitant smile.

"I am glad he has a friend in you." She told her then.

She managed to nod and keep her smile in place until Mrs. Lockwood closed the door.

Then her smile disappeared.

_Some friend she had turned out to be._

* * *

She walked by the Lockwood's cellar where Tyler had locked himself up during the last full moon and when she didn't find him there, she started walking deeper into the woods. She had managed to send a text to Stefan to let him know that she hadn't found Tyler and to give her another hour. He had replied and told her that it was only two more hours before darkness would reign with a bright beaming moon. She had texted back to say that she would be safe and that she would return in an hour.

She didn't know how far she walked, but before she knew it, the sun was gone without a trace.

He must have made it back to the cellar by now to tie himself up. He couldn't take the risk of being anywhere else. She looked down at her cell phone; she was still out of range, had been for a while. Stefan was going to kill her.

As the return destination she had in mind was certain, the trip back to the cellar was much easier with her speed. She looked at her phone and saw five voicemails and eight texts. She checked the last one. It was from Damon.

"Blondie, in case you suddenly misplaced your temporal lobe, it's a full moon tonight. You may be masochistic and want your hide bit off by an angry wolf, but there is a girl here who is worrying herself sick about you and my brother, who of course, left twenty minutes ago to rescue your ass. You better be on the verge of getting your heart ripped out for you to show such imbecilic disregard for the welfare of others."

_Fuck. _

She called Stefan right away and he picked up at the first ring.

"I am so sorry, Stefan. I am alright. My cell was out of range. I didn't find him. I am coming home now. So, don't worry. Go back home. Tell Elena that I am alright."

"No, you're not." He said after a pause.

"Yes, yes I am, Stefan. You have to believe me. Please go back home. Elena is worried."

"Where are you?" he asked, ignoring everything else she said.

"I am in Tyler's house. He wasn't in the cellar, so I just came back here to see if he had come home. He hasn't. So, I am about to leave."

"I am on my way there right now, Caroline. You better not be lying to me." He told her right before he hung up.

She breathed a sigh of relief. He wouldn't be coming into the woods then. And she knew for certain that Tyler would not be home.

She looked down at the cellar and a sense of foreboding came over her. She couldn't sense him here; she hadn't even known that she had ever been able to sense him, but it occurred to her that lately she could.

She sensed something else though, and when the hairs on her nape stood up in sudden alertness, she turned around.

It was a woman. A tall, blonde, very striking woman.

She guessed it was inevitable that they would meet. Otherwise, the day would have been abysmally anticlimactic.

"Hello Jules." She said, arranging her face into a perfect mask of nothingness.

Jules laughed slightly before walking towards her.

"Let's dispense with silly formalities. You are vermin, but good bait to draw the other vermin out. I hope they won't disappoint and stick true to their affection for you."

Just when her face started to change, the woman brought something out and sprayed it. The flesh burned off from half her face, just as she recognized vervain.

"Not so tough now, are you? It's alright. I have an even bigger surprise for you." The woman told her just as she crumbled to the floor clutching her face.

Before she could recover, there were two others on either side of her dragging her up. The vervain sprayed her face again, but her hands were restrained and she could only scream in agony as smoke rose from the seared flesh.

"Tyler knows." She heard just then. For a moment, she forgot her physical pain as the anguish of how he had likely found out took over.

But then they shot her from the back with a wooden bullet and the pain and the anguish all disappeared as she slumped into oblivion.


	20. Chapter 20: Destiny's Child

**Chapter 20: Destiny's Child**

The girl was starting to come to, Brady noticed, as he raised his head away from the wall where he had been leaning back.

"Jules, ready?" he yelled out.

Jules was several rooms away. She was with the boy, Tyler, who didn't yet know that blondie was being held in a cell here. He would soon though; they had just been waiting until the girl woke up.

The girl started pulling on the bars of the reinforced cage that she was locked in. He turned the flashlight on that he held in his hands, shining it directly on her face.

"Let me out." She said, cringing back from the intense beam, as she pulled on the bars again.

She was strong, he would give her that; the bars were starting to bend a little rattling.

Before it got out of hand, he shot her with another wooden bullet. She screamed as it hit her right below her neck and fell back.

But it was not that sound that startled him. It was another scream coming from several rooms away.

"What's wrong?" he heard Jules' voice just as he stood up.

He looked into the cage and saw that the girl had been startled by the scream too. Just as she opened her mouth to ask him something, he shot her again, right on her neck.

She screamed louder and slid down onto the floor, just as the boy's screams ricocheted through the space outside.

"What the hell?" he said as he left the room and made his way over to where Jules was keeping the boy.

The door was closed and he opened it without knocking.

The boy was on the floor clutching his neck and Jules was crouching down next to him.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

She looked up, confused. "I don't know. One minute, we are talking and he's fine and the next minute, he is screaming his lungs off, clutching his neck."

_It couldn't be._

"What?" she asked when she saw his expression.

"You have to come see this."

He walked away from the room and she followed him shortly after.

"Brady, I can't leave Tyler by himself until we figure out what's wrong with him. We don't have that much time until we start shifting."

He reached the room and pointed at the girl in the cage who was still on the floor carefully trying to pick the wood out of her neck. One of the pieces was already on the floor.

"What are you showing me?" Jules asked, looking at the girl and then back at him. "She clearly hasn't suffered enough to make her go down and stay there!"

"Jules, would you just go stand outside the boy's room and watch."

She drew back to look at him and he sighed in frustration. He didn't know why she was so keen on protecting the boy when the other Lockwood they had both known had seemed to attract trouble like moth to flames.

She finally walked down the hall and stood outside the boy's room.

He looked back into the cage and the girl inside. She had removed the second bullet and had raised herself to sit up, although her gaze was trained on him.

He stood just outside the room, in line of Jules' vision.

As she watched, he extended his gun and shot the blonde again.

The screams of the girl and the boy now rose in unison, shrill and piercing the quiet.

He saw Jules' startled gaze move to the boy inside the room and then back to him.

"That's impossible! They cannot be mated." She exclaimed in disbelief.

Yes, he finally had her attention.


	21. Chapter 21: N of 1

Chapter 21: N = 1

"Who is that?" she heard Tyler's hoarse voice ask as he clutched the side of his neck. "And what the hell is happening to me?"

Jules rushed into the room and pulled Tyler up by the arm.

"What the…" he started again, but she started running out of the room and out of the building dragging him along.

"Where are we going?" he asked, still clutching his neck.

"You have to get out of here, Tyler. Leave this building. Don't come back here for the rest of the night. Brady and I will find you shortly. Go, Go, GO." She yelled out as she pushed him out of the building and locked the door behind her.

She rushed back in and ran to Brady. He was still standing guard outside the room and the girl was no longer making any sounds.

"What's wrong?" she asked when she reached him.

"Nothing. It was too many bullets in short succession. She blacked out again. She will wake up in a few."

"We have to get her out of here." She told him. As Brady nodded, Val, a werewolf a year or two older than Tyler - came out of another room in the back. He was still belligerent, having only been through one full moon, and was jumping out of his skin in preparation for tonight's. He had none of the control that Tyler already showed. They had had to keep him in the back so that he wouldn't go for the blonde's throat even before he changed. They had tried to tell him that she could kill him given that he was still in his human form, but he was foolhardy, and listening to commands was not his forte. Brady had his work cut out for him if they were going to have to prep Val to run with the pack.

"Why?" Val asked now. "Why the hell would we get her out of here when we went to all this trouble to get her in here?"

Brady rolled his eyes and she knew that he was about to say something along the lines of, _That's nothing you need to know. _But Jules knew that exerting too much control on a teenager tended to backfire; they could become downright unruly, which would only make it all the more work for her and Brady. And so before Brady could say anything, she cut in.

"She is mated to Tyler Lockwood. It means that if we kill her, it only leaves two options for him, at least according to legends. He will go on a killing spree, taking down everything that in his path, including of course the ones who killed his mate, and then he will go mad. You don't want to go near a mad werewolf." She told him.

"What? That's fucked up! Is that what is going to happen to all of us when we get mated?"

Brady laughed without humor while she continued, trying to keep the information as brief as possible.

"We can find our mates, but it's no longer an option to "be mated." That sort of mating happens rarely."

"How do you know it can't happen to any of us?" Val asked again.

"To be mated, you have to fall in love with someone during your first transformation. I didn't have that. Brady didn't have that. You didn't have that. In fact, 99.9% of werewolves don't have that."

"How the hell did Lockwood find time to fall in love with someone while he was going through something that feels like your life is being ripped out of you?"

She and Brady exchanged glances and they looked back at the girl inside. "The only way you can fall irrevocably for someone during your transformation is if she or he was there with you throughout. That despite the possibility of harm to themselves, they stayed with you. That's the only way."

"This chick stayed with Lockwood when he wolf-ed for the first time? That's not the smartest move. She _is_ a blonde!"

She and Brady were thinking the same; there was something fishy about this whole thing. But, it couldn't really be a ploy either, because the blonde had to have fallen in love as well for them to be mated. The feelings had to be mutual, or it didn't count.

"What do we do with her now?" Val asked.

"Like Jules said before, we have to let her go. This is one vampire who should not be killed." Brady said finally.

"Wait, if Lockwood will go ape-shit and crazy if she dies, will the same thing happen to her if Lockwood dies?" Val asked.

"No. If any male werewolf dies and he's mated, his mate will die automatically." Jules answered, remembering what she had learned with interest from her grandmother when she was young. Being mated was a cursed blessing. Or a blessed curse. No one really wanted it, even with the incredible bond that it promised, the tie that you developed with your mate was so powerful that it made you feel not your own person anymore. At least that's what she had heard.

"A werewolf mated to a vampire. Ain't that something! How many of these matings do you know of?"

She looked at Brady again before they both answered in unison, "None."


End file.
